The Argument for Local Food

The Argument for Local Food

At an unimposing diner in Vermont, a revolution is
taking place.

Stop in at the Farmers Diner in Barre, Vermont, and
you have landed in the middle of a revolution, although you might not see it at
first glance. It's about what you'd expect in a town known for quarrying
granite and carving tombstones and where Main Street consists of a courthouse,
movie theater, hardware store, florist, bank, and diner. Twelve green vinyl
stools line the white linoleum countertop in this 60-seat eatery. On the back
counter, a 1960s glass pastry case displays fresh-baked pies and muffins. A
stainless steel milk dispenser hums as its contents cool, and old-fashioned
blenders stand ready to make milk shakes. A pass-thru window to the kitchen
frames the cooks as they flip omelettes and pancakes and push burnt bits of
hash-browns and bacon towards the grill's gutter. Not too different from the
original diner that opened in this long and narrow building 70 years ago.

The
place has its early morning regulars-a retired farmer, a couple of state
highway maintenance workers, electricians, plumbers, and other assorted
craftsmen-who on this gray winter morning are already cradling their bulky
white coffee mugs by 7 a.m. Booths are illuminated by 1930's style pendent
lights.

A
dozen conversations rumble, including one between me and the diner's owner and
manager, Tod Murphy. Coffee cups clink against their saucers. An occasional
ring signals that dishes are up. The waitresses' sneakers squeak on the wood
floors. "My son says his dad smells like French fries," says Murphy.

Linger
a bit longer, though, and you find that this isn't any ordinary diner. The milk
in the blenders and dispenser is certified organic, which means the cows it
came from weren't given shots of antibiotics, and weren't given feed grown with
chemical fertilizers and pesticides. It's also from a local dairy, which means
it didn't arrive in a tank truck from a place most of the folks in Barre have
never seen.

The
eggs in the omelettes are local too. The berries and flour in the muffins and
pies are from local berry patches and wheat fields. The diner cuts all its own
French fries and grinds all its own hamburger meat-the beef too coming from
local farms. In fact, while most of the food that Americans eat travels at
least 1,500 miles from farm to plate, most of the food served in this place was
grown within 50 miles, and Murphy's goal is 100 percent. It's February now and
there's still snow on the parking lot. But even in the dead of New England's
winter, the menu continues to serve a range of local produce, from grain for
the bread and pasta to beans, meat, carrots, potatoes, onions, applesauce,
cider, and beer.

I
notice that the menu covers feature pictures of the farmers who supply the
food. (Who would have thought that the food you eat in a restaurant could come
from individual people?) The plastic place-mat reads like a Who's Who of
radical thought on the state of the modern food system, which is decidedly not
about individually responsible people. I chuckle at the quote from Columbia
University nutritionist and suburban homesteader Joan Gussow: "I prefer butter
to margarine because I trust cows more than chemists." There is Wendell Berry's
famous declaration that "eating is an agricultural act." And there's a quote
from Murphy himself: "Think Locally, Act Neighborly." He tells me he won't hold
it against anyone for acting or thinking globally, but it seems too complex to
him. "Acting neighborly is something we know," he says.

The
diner is thriving. Meghan, a waitress, tells me, "We open at 5:30 every morning
and close at 9 every night. Lunch is always busy. Weekends are always busy. And
as the seasons change, things just get busier every day." The owners have plans
to open four more locations, riding a wave of interest among local farmers,
chefs, environmentalists, and concerned eaters who would like to see more
locally grown food on grocery store shelves, restaurant menus, and kitchen
tables.

But
all of this interest doesn't mean the work is easy. "I'm slaying dragons every
day," says Murphy, referring to the obstacles he faces in running a restaurant
built on local food, from onerous food safety regulations designed for
industrial-scale ventures to short-sighted farm policies that have reduced
Vermont's crop diversity, to the crushing weight of global food brands on
struggling local businesses.

As
I listen to Murphy describe his vision-what he calls a "wild experiment"-I
can't help but think that the feudal analogy fits. He really is talking about
revolution. He's talking about a shift in power as potentially profound as the
eighteenth-century dismantling of aristocracies throughout Europe. In a modern
food landscape where the Krafts, Monsantos, and ADMs play the role of the
Tudors, Tzars, and Louis XIVs, Murphy's life work is fighting for food
democracy.

At
first blush, "food democracy" may seem a little grandiose-a strange combination
of words. But if you doubt the existence of power relations in the realm of
food, consider a point made by Frances and Anna Lappé in their book Hope's
Edge. The typical supermarket contains no fewer than 30,000 items. About half
of those items are produced by 10 multinational food and beverage companies.
And roughly 140 people-117 men and 21 women-form the boards of directors of
those 10 companies. In other words, although the plethora of products you see
at a typical supermarket gives the appearance of abundant choice, much of the
variety is more a matter of packaging and branding than of true agricultural
variety, and rather than coming to us from thousands of different farmers
producing different local varieties, has been globally standardized and
selected for maximum profit by just a few powerful executives.

From
this imperialistic food landscape, we are beginning to see declarations of
independence. Some of them may seem merely quixotic, like the case of Jose
Bove, the French shepherd who drove his tractor smack into a McDonald's to
protest the homogenization of global cuisine. In Oaxaca, Mexico, a group of
citizens motivated by the same concerns succeeded in keeping a new McDonalds
from being built in their historic city center. In Canada, a continent-wide
protest against Monsanto took root when the giant agricultural chemical and
seed company filed a slapp suit against a farmer named Percy Schmeiser after
finding some of its patented seed on his land. (The Federal Court of Canada in
Saskatoon, Saskatchewan didn't find that Schmeiser had planted it-the seed had
evidently blown onto Schmeiser's land from adjoining farms using Monsanto
seed-but ruled in favor of Monsanto anyway.) And in Europe, even larger numbers
of people-enough to move governments-have been resisting the importation of
such genetically engineered products from the United States.

In
one way or another, these are all acts in defense of local food supplies and
culinary traditions. Nor are all these acts just protests. The Slow Food
movement, which is growing explosively and now has 75,000 members in 80
nations, is the largest organized movement against culinary imperialism, but
draws its energy not so much from what it is against as what it is for-a
preservation of the social value of good food in connecting people with each
other, their communities, and their land. The Slow Food movement summarizes its
vision in the phrase "the right to taste." Service at the Farmers Diner may not
be slow, but the Farmers Diner shares the Slow Food movement's interest in not
having what you eat be dictated by fast-food or mass-food marketing executives.

"My
allegiance is to this place," Murphy declares, "and I won't let Vermont land
and farmers and food history go undefended." And Vermont is not the only place
where interest in the defense of local food is rising fast.

PLANET OF COLONIES

For many of those who are declaring food independence,
there is a sense of growing urgency-"slow food" notwithstanding. Food travels
farther and is controlled by a smaller number of global entities than ever
before. Advances in technology that allow longer storage and more distant (and
less costly) shipping have encouraged the food system to sprawl. Cheap gasoline
and transportation subsidies have facilitated the expansion. The value of
international food trade has tripled since 1960; the volume has quadrupled. In
the United States, the average food item travels between 2,500 and 4,000
kilometers, about 25 percent farther than in 1980. In the United Kingdom, food
travels 50 percent farther than two decades ago.

"In
the present food marketplace, there are great inequalities with respect to
voting power and, more fundamentally, with respect to control," says
sociologist JoAnn Jaffe of the University of Regina in Canada. "This loss of
control has progressed steadily over the last few decades as people have become
increasingly removed from their food sources by both distance and processing."
And it is this issue of control, perhaps more than any other, that is driving the nascent global movement in
local food.

In
Vancouver, food activist Herb Barbolet points out that the issue of local
control is not just a vague provincial resistance to a globalizing industry.
Founder and director of the nonprofit FarmFolk/CityFolk (FF/CF), Barbolet
rattles off a list of concrete benefits:

"Less
fossil fuel use and road congestion from moving food around." (Surveys show
that a basic meal made from imported ingredients can easily account for four
times the energy and four times the greenhouse gas emissions of an equivalent
meal made with ingredients from local sources.)

"Preservation
of local farmland and local farmers." (Farmers that have a local market are
less likely to go extinct.)

"Superior
flavor." (Double-blind studies show that people consistently choose farmers'
market produce over stale, long-distance fare-one of the reasons this movement
has attracted the attention of chefs, food critics, and discriminating eaters
around the globe.)

Barbolet's
group has worked toward these ends by promoting food delivery schemes and farmers'
markets, helping to start a rooftop gardens project, opening healthy cafés in
inner-city areas of Vancouver where good food options are limited, and
reintroducing farming to a large regional park.

SAFE AND SECURE?

Barbolet pauses in his listing of the benefits of
local food, then adds one more:

"Reduced
food safety risks."

This
last advantage may not be immediately apparent. But food that travels thousands
of miles and changes hands multiple times encounters many opportunities for
contamination. For example, there was the 2001 foot-and-mouth outbreak in the
United Kingdom, which brought sales of British meat to an abrupt halt and
devastated rural communities. It spread considerably farther and faster than an
earlier outbreak in 1967, largely because animals today are shipped from all
over the nation to central slaughterhouses. In 1967 most slaughtering and
consumption took place locally. Investigation also showed that the infectious
animal feed for the recent outbreak came all the way from China. Foot-and-mouth
is not a disease that harms humans, but long-distance hauling of food means
that any infectious agent (E. coli, Listeria, anthrax) can be quickly spread
over a large area and expose a large number of people.

Recent
terrorist incidents have raised fears, especially in the United States, about
how vulnerable a highly centralized and long-distance food system could be to
tampering and disruption. (One estimate suggests that most major cities in the
eastern United States have less than two days' supply of food on hand and are
thus vulnerable to sudden transportation restrictions.) Beyond the
vulnerability issue, there is a certain peace of mind that comes from knowing
where your food comes from-a peace that may be unique to local cuisine. For instance,
a bottle of Tropicana brand apple juice says it "contains concentrate from
Germany, Austria, Hungary, Argentina, Chile, Turkey, Brazil, China, and the
United States"-a list of countries with a wide range of pesticide standards.
Good luck knowing what you're eating.

In
turn, when people have some say over local food production, they also have say
over how the landscape is used, what pollutants may end up in their water, and
how secure are the livelihoods of their neighbors. "It's much easier for our
customers to make the choice for antibiotic free meat or organic milk or
non-genetically engineered crops when we know all the growers," says the
diner's Murphy.

"This
is about homeland security, in a way," says Nina Thompson, director of the
Vermont Fresh Network, an organization that helps link Vermont farmers and
Vermont chefs. "What if the infrastructure of trucking were hit by terrorists?
Here, we'd be set."

LOCAL FOOD, LOCAL MONEY

At the Farmers Dinner, Murphy sketches out his master
plan. His words come at the steady pace of a thoughtful businessman, not a
fanatic. Murphy is a slender, attractive man in his thirties-people told me to
look for "the guy with the pony tail" of long straight blond-brown hair. A
standard diner, Murphy explains, has at most five suppliers, and often fewer.
The suppliers are the long arms of the global agribusiness industry-behemoths
like Sysco Corporation, which is the largest food distributor in North America,
and is ranked by Forbes as the second-largest food processor as well. Most
diners and restaurants just call up Sysco, place their order, and an 18-wheeler
drops it off, Murphy says. In contrast, the Farmers Diner has roughly 35
suppliers and plans to add 20 more next year (see map). In its first six months
of operation, the Diner spent 70 percent of its food budget on food grown
within a 50-mile radius.

Murphy
plans to boost that share, using a model he calls the "pod." Attached to one
side of the diner will be a government certified meat processor. Attached to
the other side will be a certified food processing facility, equipped for
canning, drying, and baking. "Most diners use pre-sliced, frozen carrots," says
Murphy, "but our goal is to have a place for processing local carrots in season
and also freezing or pickling or canning them for the off-season."

Murphy's
pod idea addresses one of the biggest barriers to greater reliance on local
food-the difficulty of building back the local crop diversity and food
processing capacity that has been eroded by successive waves of consolidation.
"In most communities, the dairy is gone, the cheesemaker is gone, the cannery
is gone, even the bakery is gone," says Andy Fischer, director of the
U.S.-based Community Food Security Coalition. In this respect, Vermont already
has some big advantages over most communities in the United States and the
world. It has one of the most diverse farm landscapes in the nation, and more
certified organic land as a share of total area than any other state in the
union. And it has more local cheese diversity than the next five states
combined, with more than 50 farmstead varieties.

"We
want the diner to be the catalyst, so farmers and food businesses can take
chances with new products and new crops," says Murphy. The food processing shop
attached to the diner can use the "seconds" and blemished fruit and veggies
that farmers would normally throw out to make soups, jams, and chutneys. As
Murphy develops relationships with local growers, the costs of doing business
can actually go down. "If we know how many potatoes and onions and tomatoes we
will need on a monthly basis, the grower knows exactly how much he can sell
us," he says. The farmer benefits in terms of cash flow and security, and can
charge Murphy less as a result.

Of
course, as Murphy's corner of Vermont becomes more self-sufficient with respect
to food, it will also tend to hold on to more of the money local people spend
on food; less money is siphoned off to pay shipping and storage and brokering
fees. The diner now buys $15,000 of produce from local farmers per month, a
number Murphy says will increase as the diner expands. "My favorite job is
writing checks to farmers," he says with a smile. He has recently been speaking
with the son of a farmer who is trying to figure out if he can keep the family
farm afloat by raising pigs for the diner.

The
argument for greater self-sufficiency has been substantiated by a recent study
from the New Economics Foundation in London, which found that every £10 spent
at a local food business is worth £25 to the local area, compared with just £14
when the same amount is spent in a supermarket. Whether it's in pounds, pesos,
or rupees, money spent locally generates nearly twice as much income for the
local economy.

Compare
this multiplier with the more colonial relationship prevailing in most rural
economies. Ken Meter and Jon Rosales, economists at the Crossroads Resource
Center in Minneapolis, recently found that while farmers in southeastern
Minnesota had sales of $866 million in farm products in 1997, they spent $947
raising this food, primarily as payments for fertilizer, pesticide, and land
made to distant suppliers, creditors, or absentee landowners. (If not for
federal subsidies, many of these farmers would not be in business.) Meanwhile,
residents of the region spent over $500 million buying food that year, almost
exclusively from producers and companies based outside of the region. Doug
O'Brien, director of the nation's largest hunger relief organization, noted the
irony of Midwestern Americans "going to a food bank for a box of cornflakes to
feed their children in a community where thousands of acres are devoted to
growing the corn for the cornflakes." In toto, Meter and Rosales concluded, the
current agricultural relationships extract about $800 million from the region's
economy each year.

LET THEM EAT GMOS

The last few times I've spoken to Murphy, he can
barely catch his breath. He's been busy, not only running a diner, but also
fielding publicity calls. Gourmet has already done the diner story; the New
York Times "Dining" section and Vermont Life have stories in the pipeline. He
asks me if I've seen the recent quote from him-"It's a freakin' diner!"-and
then promptly denies that he ever said it.

With
all this attention from the culinary elite, it might be easy to dismiss the
interest in local food as a fad. But look at an inner city area where there is
no greengrocer, though it may have quite an adequate supply of liquor stores
and fast food joints, and where a farmers market may be the only source of fresh
fruits and vegetables, or look at the poor nation that cannot afford to import
food but could grow more of its own food with the proper government supports,
and it becomes clear that the benefits of local food production are not just
for people who have money.

I
recently had a chance to discuss this point with Anuradha Mittal, who directs
the Institute for Food and Development Policy, a California-based economics
think tank better known as FoodFirst. Her group is well known for its critique
of the Green Revolution, the World Trade Organization, genetically engineered
seeds, and patents on life, but Mittal harbors a particular interest in local
food, which she sees as a major antidote for all of these other evils.

"Local
food production is about exerting independence from the whims of international
markets and the dictates of international trade agreements," Mittal told me.
"The minute you start eroding food self-sufficiency, it's a recipe for famine."
And poor nations that find themselves without food reserves will learn that
beggars can't be choosers. Mittal points to the recent diplomatic nightmare
that occurred when the government of Zambia, confronting a famine, refused
American food aid which contained genetically engineered crops. After
criticizing the African leaders for jeopardizing their citizens' lives,
American negotiators ultimately agreed to find non-genetically engineered grain
to donate, then mill it to ensure that Zambian farmers wouldn't plant the
engineered grain. But the incident raised questions about food sovereignty.

Mittal also argues that the guiding principles of global
agriculture are far from democratic. The 1999 WTO negotiations in Seattle
collapsed, she says, because the trade ministers from the Third World walked
out to protest the fact that most of the "negotiating" was going on in backroom
deals that excluded most nations. Mittal goes on to note that the guiding
language of the WTO's Agreement on Agriculture was drafted by a vice president
of Cargill, the multinational food processor and trader.

"This
is not food democracy, but food hypocrisy," Mittal says, explaining that in
recent rounds of trade negotiations the United States and Europe have
successfully encouraged poorer nations to reduce tariffs, while keeping their
own tariffs and subsidies to domestic farmers high.

Mittal
is a native of India, and I asked her about the Navdanya ("Nine Seeds")
movement to help preserve India's crop diversity and promote food
self-sufficiency. Founded in 1991, Navdanya protects local varieties of wheat,
rice, and other crops from patents by cataloguing them and declaring them
common property. It sets up locally-owned seed banks, farm supply stores, and
storage facilities, and helps to establish "Zones for Freedom," villages that
pledge to reject chemical fertilizers and pesticides, genetically engineered
seeds, and patents on life.

"Freedom"
in this context has both an economic and an ecological meaning. Local crop
diversity helps to reduce dependence on expensive agrochemicals and other
inputs, and provides resilience against major pest outbreaks or climatic
shifts. And when farmers produce for local (as opposed to export) markets,
their customer base diversifies considerably, encouraging them to plant a wider
range of crops. In this way, crop diversity reinforces self-sufficiency.

"Navdanya
is one of many, many movements at the local level," Mittal says, " where people
have realized how dire the situation has gotten, and are responding to the loss
of biodiversity, the erosion of their environment, the destruction of their
livelihoods." In India alone, she says, there are hundreds. But she also points
to the Long March Against GMOs in Thailand (working for local control over
biodiversity and greater respect for local crop varieties) or the Landless
Workers Movement in Brazil (working to rectify the glaring land distribution in
Brazil by settling landless workers and farmers on the land of large
landholders).

Of
course, as Mittal would agree, a certain amount of food trade is natural and
beneficial. But greater self-sufficiency can help buffer nations against fickle
international markets, generate wealth and jobs at home, and avoid dependence
on distant countries and companies that may not always be reliable.

FOOT SOLDIERS OF THE REVOLUTION

The Farmers Diner isn't rebuilding Vermont agriculture
single-handedly. Instead, this knight's tale depends on an array of supporting
characters. The Vermont Land Trust runs one of the few successful programs in
the United States to give a head start to beginning farmers by providing
low-interest loans, mentoring, and tax relief. Vermonters now use at least
three forms of local currency-Burlington Bread, Green Mountain Dollars, and
Buffalo Co-op Bucks-that can only be used to buy Vermont-grown food. And the Intervale
Foundation in Burlington has helped to establish a community farm that provides
food to over 350 families. It has also developed a network of farms that supply
the local hospital with most of its vegetables, fruit, and herbs, and has plans
for a community incubator kitchen where farmers and food entrepreneurs can try
their hand at food processing and catering businesses.

Hundreds
of Vermont restaurants already "source" much of their food from nearby farmers
and food businesses, largely as a result of the efforts of the Vermont Fresh
Network (VFN), the six-year-old nonprofit devoted to strengthening Vermont
agriculture. All of these agreements are based on handshakes, the group's Nina
Thompson explains. A restaurant has to have at least three different handshake
agreements to maintain membership in our network. Every farmer has to have at
least one agreement. VFN produces a monthly "Fresh Sheet" listing all the
produce available from local farmers and providing both one-stop shopping for
chefs and one-stop marketing for farmers. But it has also discovered that many
farmers and restaurateurs are duplicating each others' efforts. "In one case,
three nearby farmers were doing three separate deliveries of different products
to the same town, all selling to different buyers," Thompson explains. "Now
they share a vehicle, do just one trip between them, and get wider distribution
by piggybacking on each other's customers."

The
need for this sort of assistance appears to be widespread, since similar
efforts are unfolding in southwestern England, where Devon County Foodlinks has
been working since 1998 to connect local growers and local food outlets. On an
annual budget of less than £500,000, this government-funded effort has created
an estimated 150 new jobs, 15 farmers' markets, and 18 "box schemes" (food
delivery subscriptions known as CSAs in the United States). It has also spawned
many successful food businesses and helped to retain an estimated £9 million in
the local economy. In Devon, as in Vermont, the need for action by government
or local groups is clear. "We are making ‘interventions' to address local
market failures," says Foodlinks founder Ian Hutchcroft, "because the private
sector is not investing in local food businesses in a major way, and, in many
ways, the cards are stacked against them."

Thompson
shares this sentiment: "Lobbyists are working for everything else. There is no
special interest group." But while the advocates of local food production
aren't a major lobby group, they are gaining support from a growing segment of
the population, a segment that potentially includes every person who plants a
home garden, every farmer who wants to sell food to his neighbors, every parent
who cares about the food served in school cafeterias, and every family that
takes the time to eat home-cooked food together-all people performing small but
powerful acts of rebellion against food that is increasingly transformed,
sterilized, and removed from its source.

That
segment also includes the 50 or so people crammed into the Farmers Diner on
this winter day, not to mention the founder of the diner himself. Murphy was
born on a dairy farm in Connecticut, but laments the fact that his family sold
off the last of the animals well before he had a chance to try his own hand at
farming. "I've spent the last 33 years trying to get back to farming, " he
says. He has started a 100-sheep dairy with his wife, and hopes that one day
his cheese and lamb will be on the diner's menu.